Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 64.
The power and difficulty of Lacan’s concept of sexed subjectivity for feminism lie in its linking of social, psychic and corporeal sexual difference. The very ground of feminist critiques of Lacan’s account is also that which makes it a powerful account of the formation of masculinity and femininity. This theory offers us, first, an explanation of the formation of sexed subjectivity, and second, an understanding of sexed subjectivity in which:
- To become a subject is to become sexed.
- To be sexed is to be caught within representations of sexual difference.
- That signification is contingent and not fixed by the body.
In this account, sexual difference is both necessary and necessarily contingent. While Lacanian epistemology presents the knower as if it were outside the field of sexual difference, the Lacanian theory of sexuation situates all subjects within that field. Zizek points out that ‘[o]ne of the crucial differences between psychoanalysis and philosophy concerns the status of sexual difference: for philosophy, the subject is not inherently sexualised . . . whereas psychoanalysis promulgates sexualisation into a kind of formal, a priori, condition of the very emergence of the subject’ (1998a: 81). As a speaking subject, the knowing subject of Lacanian epistemology is therefore also sexed. While Lacan does not develop his work in this way, in the next section of the chapter I read Lacan’s accounts of knowledge and sexuation together to develop a theory of the formation of the sexed knower and its knowledges. I interweave Lacanian epistemology and the Lacanian account of sexuation to offer a possible answer to the question: ‘How, then, is sexual difference, this fundamental Real of human existence, inscribed into the matrix of the four discourses? How, if at all, are the four discourses sexualised?’ (Zizek 1998a: 82). (64)